After these messages...

I know I left this blog on a cliffhanger, and I'm terribly sorry about that. We have family here from overseas right now, so I haven't had much time for updates. I'll be back to my regular schedule very soon. Thanks for hanging in there! I'll be back towards the end of next week.

Please enjoy Ray Comfort on The Atheist Experience for now! Be warned that the playback is extremely loud. It's quite hilarious, though.

Hell hath no...

...anything, actually, because it doesn't exist. Not according to the christian bible, anyway.

No, really.

Fred Clark has been doing a wonderful series on the doctrine of hell, where it came from, how it slithered its way into christian culture, and why it's a particularly nasty worldview. In order:

1. Team Hell Gets Loud
2. The epistemology of Team Hell
3. Should I not be concerned?
4. Rob Bell vs. Team Hell (cont'd)
5. The Paradox of Pitchforks, a devilish problem
6. That chair doesn’t belong in this play
7. The Missiological Case for Hell
   

I'll update this list if he continues to write on the subject. The notion that hoping or believing that bad, awful, torturous things will happen to people is counter to christian principles should not be radical. Sadly, this isn't the case.

If you're a christian and you've been grappling with the fear that people you care about might endure an eternity of suffering at the hands of the god you believe to be the embodiment of love, take heart. Let it go. Live in love.

If you're not christian, but you've got loved ones who've been urging you (whether out of concern or malice) that your wicked ways will mean that you burn forever let them know that it's ok. They can stop worrying. God loved the Ninevites just as much as god loved anyone else. If you love each other, things will be ok.

To anyone who identifies as christian, as I do, you can stop hoping for pain and suffering. You can stop delighting in torment. You can stop fearing separation and loneliness. We can feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome strangers, clothe the naked and visit the sick.

We can let go of hell and hold on to love.

Indoctrination, part 1

The subject of how my husband and I want our son to be exposed to religion comes up with relative frequency when my mother is around. She's devoutly christian. My husband is Jewish (non-practicing), and more specifically Israeli. We want our son to know and be involved with my husband's side of the family and the culture and traditions that go along with it. My mother is supportive, in a strange she-doesn't-understand-the-difference-between-Judaism-and-christianity sort of way. For example, I've had to explain to her at least half a dozen times that no, Judaism doesn't consider Jesus a prophet, or particularly important, or, frankly, at all.

She means well, though, and I'm thankful she's supportive.

Whenever our son stays with my mother and her husband, he goes to church with them. He's only eight months old, so that just means he crawls around a brightly colored room with a bunch of other babies and toddlers, chewing on stuffed veggie tales toys. I'm more worried about germs than indoctrination. She keeps checking to make sure this is ok, for some reason. This happened again earlier this week, when I met her to pick my son up. It went a bit like this:

Mom: "[Your husband] doesn't mind us taking [your son] to church with us, does he? I mean, I know he's anti-religion."
Me: "He's not anti-religion, mom, he just doesn't practice."
Mom: "Well, remember that time he said he hates all the conflict and stuff like that? I just don't want him to be upset."
Me: "He's Israeli, mom. I'd probably be sick of religious conflict, too."
Mom: "Well, I don't know what that means."
Me: "It means he's not anti-religion, he's anti-douchebag. He just doesn't like it when people are jerks to each other."
Mom: "I just don't want him to get mad if we bring [your son] to church. It's important that he learns about both. I mean, it's just daycare, anyway, but later."
Me: "Well, later it's not [my husband] you need to worry about, it's me. I don't want him going to youth groups. You can take him with you to church, but he can't join the youth group ministry there."

This sparked a half hour long discussion in the parking lot of a BBQ joint in New Braunfels, Tx--a tiny town nearly halfway between San Antonio (where my mom lives) and Austin (my hippy-dippy-wonderful-city). Her husband just sort of stood there quietly, and patiently, shuffling his feet every few minutes and waiting for me to remember to open my trunk so he could move the stroller from their car to mine.

My mother and I have had very different experiences with christianity. This is, I'm convinced, in no small part due to her conversion later in life. Most religions have a sort of "get 'em while their young" mentality. What my mother has learned from and about christianity is mostly of the love your neighbor variety. She believes in being kind, and charitable. It's really quite lovely, and I hope that she exposes my son to that worldview. I have every confidence that she's going to be a positive influence on his life, and I know that her faith will be a large part of that.

What worries me is that she's got an alarming blind spot when it comes to all of the other stuff christian churches tend to teach. I realized after our discussion that, aside from her general predisposition towards naivete, this is because she wasn't actually raised in the church.

My parents became "born again" when I was probably 6 or 7. My childhood was a strange amalgam of the movies Saved! and Jesus Camp, if you're looking for a frame of reference. If you've seen the former film, I started out as a Hilary Faye sort of person and by the time I was in Junior High I was a cross between Chad Faust and Mary Cummings. If the movie had focused on Chad trying to reconcile his faith and his homosexuality rather than Mary and her pregnancy (and, you know, if Chad had been a girl), that probably would've been my high school experience.

We moved from Texas to California and back again, and changed churches with relatively frequency before settling on one for most of my high school years. I've been to mega-churches and tiny churches and churches that were tiny and quickly became mega. They were all "non-denominational" which means evangelical if you're in Texas.

One was charismatic, but we didn't figure that out until someone fell on me while "caught up in the spirit." I was at a youth group meeting, which is where I spent all of my Wednesday nights, standing among the dented folding chairs and singing along with the band as quietly as I could when suddenly, the girl next to me began to convulse mid-hymn. One minute she's singing, and the next she's clucking and hissing and having what I thought was a seizure. She slammed into me and we both landed, sprawling, in the middle of the aisle with her pinning me down, still having spasms and making unintelligible noises. I was pulled out from under her, and the adults all started circling her and praising Jesus. Another teen could tell I was completely dumbfounded and helpfully explained that the girl wasn't sick, but was rather speaking in tongues because she had been touched by the spirit.

We soon switched churches, thankfully.

Most youth groups I joined weren't nearly that exciting, but were quite a bit more insidious.

When you're a young child and you're attending (christian) church you just learn some heavily edited bible stories. Mostly they're from the Old Testament, so it's a lot of Noah and his Ark, Jonah and the Whale, David and Goliath, Joshua at Jerocho, Joseph and his Dream-Coat. They're taken utterly out of context, and taught from a christian perspective which makes them seem surreal looking back on what I was told they meant then, and what I understand them to mean now. Sometimes you might venture into Jesus and the Loaves and Fishes, although it focuses on the miracle of feeding thousands and not the actual Sermon on the Mount, which is a shame. There's also a lot of singing. You sing about god, and Jesus, and pharisees and sadducees ("cause the sadducees were sad, you seeeee" - it didn't make much sense, but we were 6, so we didn't know - shut up).

When you're an adult in a (christian mega) church, you're probably hearing a lot about how to deal with stress--usually related to money, work or family. You still sing a lot, but it's more generic god is awesome, Jesus died for me type stuff. In the better churches you learn a lot about the gospels, although they still inexplicably skip over the sermon on the mount more often than not. In the not-so-great churches they talk about the book of Revelations a lot.

In the terrible churches they only ever talk about homosexuality and abortion. You still sing, though.

You sing a lot, if you're in the Bible Belt. Lots and lots of singing, and very little dancing. You learn a few Hebrew words for the songs, pronounced horribly, and used in entirely the wrong context. El Shaddai gets thrown around in reference to Jesus, which doesn't make a lick of sense. I blame Amy Grant.

If I ever took my husband into an evangelical church I think we'd be asked to leave just because he wouldn't be able to stop laughing at me.

In any case, aside from the terrible churches it's all pretty benign if you're an adult or a very young kid. Your mega-church could be funding all kinds of nasty political nonsense or engaging in sex-scandals and you'd never really know it if you just show up on Sundays.

As you start to head towards adolescence, though, that's when they really try to get their hooks in. That's when all of the really twisted, anti-science, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-kindness, anti-christian stuff gets introduced because that's when you're impressionable enough to believe it and emotionally vulnerable enough start being desensitized to the idea of victimizing others or being a victim.

This is a really crucial juncture for Bizarro Christianity.

Kids are starting to question things as they get closer to middle school or junior high. They're beginning to wonder if maybe the adults don't' actually have everything figured out. They're starting to care more about what their friends think than their parents. Girls are starting to wonder if it's ok to be brave and curious and adventurous. Boys are starting to wonder if it's really ok to be affectionate, compassionate, and emotional. They've learned the basics of the scientific method, and perhaps taken earth or physical science. They're about to take biology, which means an introduction to evolution. They're probably starting to notice some of the contradictions present in the things they're learning in church, if they're clever. They may even be starting to wonder about some basic philosophical paradoxes, like why does god let bad things happen?

They're starting to realize they don't quite know what all the fuss is about that sex stuff, but it may just be sort of interesting. Perhaps they're starting to notice who they're noticing, and hoping that those people are noticing them, or perhaps hoping the people they're noticing aren't noticing they're noticing them. It's all very confusing and hormonal.

If Bizarro Christianity is going to supplant all of the stories of kindness, love and sharing children learned up until that point, youth ministries have to work quickly and decisively.

The story of how that process manifested in the youth ministries I was part of, in my life, and from my perspective, is understandably a bit long. As such, I'll continue with the next part of the story on Monday.

And in the end...

I took a creative writing class, about a million years ago, when I was in college. One of the first things you learn in creative writing is to avoid hinging everything on a twist ending. It may or may not be exciting the first read through, has a tendency to backfire completely, and no one will ever pick up your story a second time. A good story can and should stand alone on its own merits with the beginning, middle, and end providing the same amount of enjoyment.

The point of a good story is the journey on which it takes you, not the destination at which you arrive. That's why I don't really mind spoilers, in most cases. If a story (movie, book, television series, whathaveyou) is worth being bothered with then knowing what happens ahead of time rarely diminishes that experience.

Bizarro Christians, however, love twist endings.

They're utterly obsessed with only two parts of the New Testament: the death and resurrection of Jesus, and their extremely distorted "interpretation" of the book of revelations. Honestly, how much more twisty-ending can you get? Their version of the gospels goes:

"This guy Jesus died. The devil won. Everybody was pretty upset about it. BUT! It turns out he was totally god and he comes back to life! We win! The end!"

Revelation goes similarly. Rather than reading it as a piece of literary, historical, or allegorical writing they latched onto the 19th century rise of dispensationalism and view it as some sort of outline for the apocalypse*.

To them, the book of Revelation goes: "Jesus shows up, fights off the devil and his sidekick the anti-christ, tortures everybody we don't like, boots them all into hell, and WE WIN! Again!"

It's honestly the doctrinal equivalent of "My dad can beat up your dad. Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah" except instead of their dad beating up our dad, their dad beats up us which doesn't seem altogether fair. It's a weird thing to wish on other people, but there it is.

So those are the two topsy-turny-twisty endings that make up about 90% of the evangelical doctrine, in the U.S.

I suppose those endings are very comforting, for some people. The message of both is "We win! You lose! Ha!" which would obviously be attractive to a lot of folks. It disappears thousands of years of christianity, and more appallingly the entirety of Jesus' three year ministry. Jesus had a lot to say, and the folks who wrote the gospels had a lot to say about the things he said, and the folks who've been writing about the gospels ever since have yet more lots to say about the things those other people said.

But those stories don't have compelling enough endings, I guess. Most holy books, religious writings, or philosophical texts are designed to indicate how we should interact with the people we come in contact with, navigate the experience of being human, or commune with the divine in some way. They're intended to enrich, teach, or enlighten. At their most basic, they're designed to form a structure to live by, with stories, histories, rules, explanations and mythologies to illustrate a richness of experience for us to draw from as we grapple with who we are and where we're going - individually and together.

Whether you find inspiration and guidance from the Bhagavad Gītā, Tanakh, Qur'an, New Testament, Buddhavacana or from Dandelion Wine, the point is what it teaches you and how it touches you. The point is not to race to the end to justify the rightness of your position over all others.

In summary, I defer to Messrs Lennon/McCartney:



*This reading of the book of Revelation is, of course, not at all biblical. How and why it's such a perverse view of biblical teaching, and christianity in general, has and is being explained over at Slacktivist with an eloquence I could never hope to achieve.

Soap bubbles

I have a tattoo on the back of my neck from when I visited Australia in 2005. It's generally covered by my hair, so people rarely see or comment on it. Someone recently did notice it when I was working out and had my hair up.

Her: "My friend who lives across the street is Australian."

Me: "Oh?"

Her: "Well, she's not really my friend anymore. She was, but, you know. I'm friendly, I like everybody, but you don't mess with my kids."

That seemed a reasonable position. Being a new mother I've not yet had the experience first hand, but most of my friends with children have retreated from a relationship due to the disregard of some kid-related boundary. The woman to whom I was speaking seems to be very kind from what I know of her. She's quite pleasant about everyone and everything, usually upbeat, and I don't think I've ever heard her genuinely complain about anything. The story she told wasn't at all what I was expecting. She continued:

"Well, my kid would go over there sometimes, and once he was playing a video game with some guy who had on a 'Jesus Rocks' t-shirt. My neighbor starts saying..."

At this point I must note that she broke into a pretty fair fake Aussie accent. I was impressed

"...Ohhhhh, I don't believe in Jeeeeesus like that. I just think he was like Elvis or whatever."

I stared at her blankly for a moment, waiting to hear the rest of the story. I think she noticed my confusion, because she began to elaborate.

"I don't care what people believe, or whatever, but my kids were raised to believe Jesus is Our Lord, and we may not go to church, really, but that's how they were raised and what they believe. My son was very disturbed and came home asking me 'Mom, why would she say that about The Lord?'"

From there she explained that she spoke to her neighbor and requested that such things not be said in front of her son anymore. The neighbor apparently launched into a tirade about how her kid is a giant brat - which isn't really a mature response and seems to be how those kinds of parental interactions go all too often. In reality, it sounds like the friendship ended because the neighbor went on the defensive rather than respecting this woman's boundaries. The boundary she was attempting to establish perplexes me, though.

Being a parent is difficult, and trying to navigate how to introduce the world to your kid can be intimidating. I can understand wanting to limit your child's exposure to things that may upset or disturb them. I plan on limiting my son's exposure to violent imagery, for instance, until he's old enough to process it. The bit that has me flummoxed is the notion that people having different beliefs is somehow disturbing or upsetting. This, to me, seems like a missed opportunity to have a discussion about diversity of belief. There are people in this world who don't believe anything about Jesus at all. A lot of them, in fact. This kid will eventually encounter them, and I'm not entirely sure how this mother will expect him to react when he does.

I'm certainly not advocating this as an opportunity to proselytize either direction as the circumstance was likely inappropriate. From what little information I was given it sounded like the neighbor merely mentioned her point of view in passing. Additionally, my understanding is that the boy is currently in or very close to middle school. I'm not sure how he was even able to avoid the existence of non-christians before this point.

The tendency Bizarro Christians have to want to avoid acknowledging the existence of things they disagree with is, frankly, disrespectful to everyone involved. They home school their children, or send them to private religious schools. They shelter them as much as possible, and then just sort of release them into the world completely unequipped to deal with all of the new and exciting adventures on which they’ll embark. This transition is never a graceful one, and usually results in the sheltered child being traumatized and lashing out at whatever or whomever they encounter that they don’t understand.

This is one of the many reasons young christians give most people the impression that they’re giant douchebags.

This also manifests itself in a much more sinister way. The Bizarro Christian legislators want to simply erase or even violently destroy anything they’re uncomfortable with. Their sights are currently set on – in no particular order - science, women, GLBTQs, Muslims, immigrants (or anyone sort of brownish or who speaks Spanish), the poor, and the sick. They also have their sights set on teachers and unions, but I find that to be an extension of their distaste for science, women, poor people and people of color.

I wish the GLBTQ community could unionize, just to give republicans an aneurysm.

The notion of being “in the world but not of the world” is quite popular among American evangelicals. When I was a teenager, this essentially meant eschewing rock music for incredibly insipid christian facsimiles. What it appears to have become is a desire to separate out everything in the world that could possibly threaten or contradict Bizarro Christianity as a paradigm and then dismiss, ignore or destroy those things.

As much damage as they do, Bizarro Christians cannot destroy the rest of the world – at least, not anytime soon. Hiding from or smashing anything that makes you consider your faith on a more sophisticated level weakens it. This soap-bubble faith that must be protected from the rest of the world at all costs simply won’t survive in the long term. Unfortunately, it’ll do quite a bit of damage in the interim.

Courtesy

There's a lot about this video that makes it a bit of a train wreck. It's all very typical, and something I've unfortunately experienced from both sides.



What really intrigues me starts at about 9:10.

If you do go back and watch the entire video, and you're anything like me, the gum chewer will make your teeth itch with his overwhelmingly snotty attitude. For 9 minutes (excluding cuts to a woman who seems a little more well-meaning, if equally clueless and presumptuous) he condescends to PZ Myers as if he was speaking to a very small child. The irony would be hilarious if this sort of thing weren't so common.

Gum-chewer is an idiot. And he revels in it. He finds his ignorance delicious, and he wraps it around him like a grand cloak, strutting and pontificating for people he obviously perceives to be his lessers. He grows more and more haughty as he throws all of his stock arguments out, hoping desperately one will stick. When none do, he falls back on the "we're not going to convince each other" line. Myers won't allow an easy retreat, however, and calls him out.

"There's a good reason for that, and that's because you're an ignorant fool and I'm an educated scientist."

Gum-chewer's waning confidence soars. You can see the "gotcha" moment flash in his eyes as his smirk returns. He's won on the merits of civility. None of his "arguments" worked, but at least he's the better person because he was courteous, polite, civil, and kind. If your opponent stoops to attacks, while you remain calm, you're obviously superior as is your position by extension of your inherent goodness in the face of their boorishness.

And here we are again on planet Bizarro Christian.

It is not courteous to arrive at a gathering to which you've not been invited to protest the very existence of those in attendance. It is not polite to waste people's time by interrupting their day with a display intended to make oneself feel superior. It is not civil to engage, distract, or in some cases attempt to harass people going about their business in order to attempt to derail their lives completely. It is not kind to distribute books containing information stolen from its author, twisted, edited, misrepresented, all to serve an agenda that attacks the original content by presenting a false and warped version of it.

Likewise, what PZ Myers said was not discourteous in the least. Gum-chewer was profoundly ignorant. He was ignorant of the identity of the person with whom he was speaking. He was obviously ignorant of the nature of evolution and its basic precepts. He was ignorant of the most basic concepts foundational to biology. He was ignorant of the ridiculously flimsy nature of the claims he was making. If he was anything other than a fool, those aspects of his personality were not immediately apparent.

What Myers said was simply fact. Gum-chewer was attempting to engage in a conversation he was woefully unprepared for. This man has completely sheltered himself from any of the information necessary to meaningful discussion on the subject he was trying to broach. These protesters inserted themselves into the space of another group of people, demanded attention, and did not even bother to do any preparation in the realm of the subject they want to engage people on.

How is that civility? It is audacity.

And armed with this presumptuousness, these types of protesters go even further and demand that they are listened to with rapt attention, and never challenged. They want to derail people's conversations, daily lives, with the ultimately goal of derailing their very existence, and any resistance is considered rude.

This example is merely a microcosm of something that happens on a much larger scale particularly in the U.S.* As the country attempts to have a discussion about where we should be headed, Bizarro Christians jump up and demand their positions be heard. They then proceed to bring nothing of substance to the table, instead relying on attacks, verbal slight of hand or outright lies to get them through the conversation. When called out for such behavior they hide behind of veil of religious belief as untouchable. You can't have it both ways. Either you're part of the debate and the views you present are open to critical examination, or they're protected from such challenges because they're personal and therefore private - and as such should be removed from the conversation.

I would argue that having ones faith challenged is a good thing for the cultivation of said faith, in any case, but that's a post in its own right.

When my family got together for holiday meals, we generally had a table for the adults, and a table for the children. Often, the kids wanted to sit at the grown up table (until they discovered it was incredibly boring, in any case). This was permitted so long as the child behaved appropriately in that environment. If one of the children sat with the adults and began demanding attention, getting loud, derailing or distracting the conversation the adults were having, or otherwise trying to change the mood at the table from adult-centric to kid-centric, they were promptly removed and placed at the appropriate table. Their behavior wasn't necessarily bad, it was simply inappropriate for that context. They had an environment in which they could act that way, and the grown up table wasn't it.

This is how we should treat Bizarro Christians. They have their kid's table. They can talk about whatever absurd thing they want, bicker, steal from each other's plates, cry about who got more of what, break each other's toys, or even just enjoy each other's company and play quietly amongst themselves. It's up to them, really. But they have their mega-churches, and their radio shows, and their websites, and television stations, and publishing houses, and record companies, and on and on and on. It's not as if their table is small. They take up a lot of space in this country, and they have a lot of room to do whatever is it they want to do. We have no motivation to let them take the skeptic's conventions, science classrooms, and floor of the senate and house as well.

But we let them. Why?

I have no problem with faith informing what people do in their day to day lives. You can't really compartmentalize such a huge part of yourself away. My faith informs the fact that I value rational discourse. It is partially my faith that makes me want to keep explorations of religion out of the political discourse and especially out of the realm of science. Attempting to equate the two disrespects them both.

It is not discourteous to tell a petulant brat that they are being obnoxious, and must behave appropriately if they wish to stay.

*I can't speak to anywhere outside of North America, as I've only visited Australia and Israel, and wasn't either place long enough to get a good bead on the political or religious discourse from anything but an outsider's perspective.